Obsidian’s Kickstarter Is “Project Eternity”

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It seemed inevitable, and so it was: Obsidian’s Kickstarter project “aims to recapture the magic, imagination, depth, and nostalgia of classic RPGs that we enjoyed making – and playing.” It’s called Project Eternity, which is a working title, it’s going to be led by Chris Avellone, Tim Cain, and Josh Sawyer, and they want $1.1m.

You can watch the pitch video below.

Key bit, as far as I am concerned:

Combat uses a tactical real-time with pause system – positioning your party and coordinating attacks and abilities is one of the keys to success. The world map is dotted with unique locations and wilderness ripe for exploration and questing. You’ll create your own character and collect companions along the way – taking him or her not just through this story, but, with your continued support, through future adventures. You will engage in dialogues that are deep, and offer many choices to determine the fate of you and your party. …and you’ll experience a story that explores mature themes and presents you with complex, difficult choices to shape how your story plays out.

Text says, “We are Obisidan. We have people who worked on Planescape: Torment, Baldur’s Gate, Icewind Dale, KOTOR 2, Fallout: New Vegas, etc. We’d like to make a new PC RPG, kind of a spiritual successor to Planescape: Torment. We’d like you to give us money so that we could do so.”

So, of course I’ll be buying this, but does it strike anyone else as a little strange/disappointing that they could have done anything — literally set this game anywhere and probably hit their funding target — but they chose to go back to the high fantasy well YET AGAIN?

What would you have them do? You basically have Fantasy and Sci Fi, or real world (modern or past). You can’t outright dismiss it because it’s labeled Fantasy. Just like Sci Fi can encompass a ton of settings so can fantasy. If they go the elf, dwarf, etc route then yeah reason for complaint.

Even then, who gives a crap? If a game is fun I’ll play it, regardless of elves and dwarves. I like how you already wrote it off because of one word without knowing about the actual game setting.

Well, it sounds like they want to do some interesting things with magic, and where else are you going to get that but in a fantasy game? And the market these days (at least in Triple-A) hasn’t had much high fantasy; it’s been more dark fantasy. 4 years ago I might have shared your sentiment, but I feel like we’ve had enough of a break for a pure fantasy game.

I’m all for fantasy. But gimme the kind of fantasy where I play as an anthropomorphic evening suit inside a giant planet-sized tortoise that moves from galaxy to galaxy consuming the lifeblood of planets. Maybe that was a bad example, but something new and crazy.

It just irks me that the genre that has literally infinite possibilities constantly pigeonholes itself into the same bland settings over and over.

Games are not only stuck on “high fantasy,” but a specific high-fantasy at that. The Tolkien-by-way-of-D&D notion of fantasy is so prevalent that I’m actually happy when I see a game that even diverges so slightly that all they’ve done is remove the elves and orcs. It’s rather appalling that of all the things that “fantasy” could be, games are largely trapped in this one tiny sub-genre. I really don’t get it.

I have to join the chorus to agree. Part of my soul dies every time I see an elf in furs with a longbow. An elf in an evening suit with a crowbar, however, might be more palatable. :)

Though I love infinity-engine games, I feel like RPG-makers have been a bit too slavish in trying to recreate them. With BG: Enhanced edition coming out and what-not, I just hope they can do something more than make another clone.

I am 70% psyched about this, but I would be much more excited if they sold themselves as being more than the sum of their past work’s experience, great as their past work is.

The thing is, Elves have become linked with trees, nature, bows, etc. That, or slaving away for Santa.

Your “elves in evening suits with crowbars” are just that, Tolkein / D&D elves being dressed up in suits and given crowbars. So either there’s the story for how they left the trees and became mafia goons, or you’re not dealing with Elves at all, just a race of pointy eared people, in which case, why are you calling them “Elves”? Call them Murai or Turicans or Scotches or whatever.

Elf connotes a set of visual ideas as well as thematic ones. If you say “elf in an evening suit with a crowbar” people know exactly what you mean visually. Saves you the trouble of describing called a Rovund or Kaalem or whatever that’s lithe with delicate features and pointed ears just for people to go “oh, an elf, why didn’t you just say that?”

There’s also the fact that you might want to very much call to mind those traditional elven characteristics, to then subvert them, and calling them something else adds a distancing and is actively harmful to what you’re trying to accomplish.

Basically there’s a few reasons why you might want to keep a traditional fantasy creature recognizable, even if you’re planning to do very nontraditional things with them.

If you check out the Kotaku interview linked in the article, there is some info on this…

“It’s fantasy with its own voice. Josh Sawyer has been leading the charge with the world and race creation—at first glance, players will recognize archetypes and seemingly-familiar landscapes, but often, we just use that as a means to draw you in and let you begin to see the subtleties and differences. Our first goal with the world creation was to make a world that’s fun to explore first, and then construct the lore, factions, and conflicts around that.”

So, it sounds like they’re going for, on the surface it’s familiar fantasy, but underneath it’s not that same, tired, old, generic fantasy. There’s some more in the Gamebanshee interview that went up recently as well.

Also, it’s what they have been wanting for years, and years, and years… their OWN franchise, their OWN world, their OWN thing. And they kept coming back to Fantasy… it’s what they want to do, basically. I’m confident that we’ll get something suitably ‘unique’ from them.

This gives me pause as well. Not that I doubt they’re capable of doing an interesting fantasy RPG, it’s just that this is the first time Obsidian gets to make a game without publisher pressure so I really hope it’s going to be more than just a retread of the RPGs of old.

I’m just happy that it’s an original IP, so they have unlimited creative freedom. The only original IP Obsidian has done so far is Alpha Protocol, which didn’t really allow them to do any crazy fantasy stuff.

I was ready to cut them some slack for choosing a Fantasy setting until I saw the bit about “recognizable archetypes”. Ugh… now, I don’t know. It would be nice to hear more about how closely the races and world will follow hackneyed stereotypes (or not), before I start chipping in on Kickstarter.

High fantasy doesn’t have to follow the Tolken/D&D archetypes to be successful. I mean, look at Zelazny’s “Amber” book series. That had swordplay and magic in an original setting, and I think it would be a blast to play in that world as an RPG. Or has anyone here read the recent Richard K. Morgan books (The Steel Remains and the Cold Commands)? Nary an Elf or Dwarf in sight, with interesting races and world building.

If this new project is something original like that, I’ll jump on the Kickstarter bandwagon. I think they’re missing an opportunity to explain a little more about how this will be more than just a different take on Baldur’s Gate. I’ll probably pick up the new version of BG to play on iPad, and after that, I don’t think I’ll be able to handle another game with an Elf in it.

Very well said. I haven’t read those series, but I can point to other fantasy such as Vance’s Tales of a Dying Earth, Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser books, all the way to The Scar by Mieville or Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun. Hell, look at Wolfe’s Wizard Knight books to see fairly generic fantasy done in a fresh, smart way.

I understand that there are a lot of people who enjoy generic high fantasy stuff. I don’t want to insult anyone for liking what they like. But the history of both fantasy literature and gaming paints a very troubling picture of creators unwilling to take any risks or to have their own unique vision. I think it’s a shame for a crowd sourced project – in theory the best opportunity to try something different and to take some risks – to be so content to rehash familiar archetypes (even if they are subverted eventually) instead of moving boldly into new territory.

At some point it stops being fantastical if it’s familiar to the point of disinterest.

I’m not quite sure what to expect. I was elated when I read this quote from Avellone: “We wouldn’t do anything approaching traditional fantasy in the look/layout of the world. Why? Because I’m exhausted with that.” I have no problem with fantasy; what I can’t stomach are bland, lazy Tolkien derivatives.

I’m not getting much solace from the World Map they’re showing on the Kickstarter page (and above), with names like:

Godhammer Citadel
The Pearl Coast
Steel Crown Tower
Sorcerer’s Tomb

“The Pearl Coast”… okay, maybe a reasonable nod to The Sword Coast setting, but other things like “Sorcerer’s Tomb” just look very generic and lazy, if you’re going to build a unique fantasy world. Maybe it’s just an early mockup and not the real game world.

Sorry to be negative, because I’d really like to see a great turn-based RPG from Obsidian. But the vibes so far, don’t feel so good. Again, more info from the devs (or anyone else tracking this project) would help.

Yeah, I’ll buy anything Obsidian make, but after the brilliant Alpha Protocol I wouldn’t have minded a game based somewhere other than the realms of high fantasy. In fact it strikes me as odd they’d choose a ‘safe’ setting (please don’t misunderstand RPSers, it’s only safe in RPG terms, which in many ways isn’t safe at all) like that instead of something else they’ve always wanted to do. A legion of possibilities and they choose this one?

If it weren’t Obsidian, I’d agree with you, but even Dungeon Siege III, which is absolutely their most generic game, has some pretty remarkable touches lore-wise. I don’t think we’ll be getting Oblivion Part 2 here.

Avellone’s also been making noise for a long time about subverting a lot of typical high-fantasy cliches. So there’s that.

Dungeon Siege III was pretty memorable, especially Jeyne Kassynder. I remember Jeyne Kassynder, because in the intro they mention Jeyne Kassynder about 10 times. I only played Dungeon Siege III for about 90 minutes before I couldn’t stand it anymore, but I’ll never forget Jeyne Kassynder.

I think if he’s going to have intellectual ambitions, he has to be honest and rigorous enough to admit that high fantasy cliches are not exactly the most daring or productive target anymore. There was a time when questioning whether Tolkien was really all that was a bold stance, but that was a long time ago. Nowadays I’d argue fantasy is dealing with more sophisticated questions framed by ambiguous characters set within believable histories and cultures. If he talked about exploring the problematic gender politics in Game of Thrones he’d get my attention, since that feels, I dunno, relevant.

Perhaps I’m being unfair; maybe he has a unique spin on things that we just haven’t seen before, but if so, he should tell us about it.

Guess I just need to read more before I get excited for this one. In fantasy more than many genres, I think the devil is in the details, and I’m just not seeing many here.

Well, if they licensed the Richard K. Morgan series I mentioned above, they’d have a main character who is very reminiscent of Geralt The Witcher except for one little detail… his sexual preference is other males, not the town wench..

@D3xter: No, I’m not suggesting that they do some lame, neutered romances like in the recent Bioware games. I don’t think you can do in a game for a mass market audience what can be done in a novel, and I hope there’s no “party romance” at all in this project.

I was just pointing out that the fantasy genre is no longer your GrandDad’s Tolkien, or your Dad’s D&D. And it would be nice to get away from the adolescent themes and constant recycling of boring archetypes when this setting is used for a computer game.

Whether it would be a good RPG is a separate question, but I think you could absolutely make an interesting fantasy RPG about feminism and gender politics without it being awful.

Buffy The Vampire Slayer could make a great RPG, for example, and that’s drenched in feminism and gender politics.

Not to mention that, you know, feminism and gender politics have absolutely nothing at all to do with “romance,” Biowarean romance (which has nothing to do with the interesting aspects of romance, and is in fact a very shallow treatment of the issue by any metric) especially. But feminism, gender politics, and romance are all a huge part of the human experience, and it’s idiotic to suggest that RPGs should never go there just because it makes you uncomfortable.

Here, for example, is an idea for an RPG about gender politics and feminism that wouldn’t make you retch: you play as a girl who’s wanted to be a knight ever since she was little, but only men are knights. Undeterred, you set out to prove to the local order of knights that you are just as capable as them by doing valiant deeds. Eventually, you get what you want, but it turns out that the order is a corrupt band of thugs and rapists (as most real knights were) in service to a despotic king. You then have to decide whether to rebel, attempt to change the system from within, be just as corrupt as the men, or any one of a range of options in between. Isometric, turn-based combat, dialogue trees, a branching storyline, the ability to kill anyone and have the story respond organically, etc.

Boom. In five minutes, I came up with a fantasy RPG about gender politics and feminism that doesn’t feel like Betty Friedan screaming in your face. Your argument is invalid.

Heh, well, setting aside the fact that our definitions of RPG radically diverge for the moment, I should point out that that’s just the elevator pitch. Make the whole society rigidly patriarchal, and you’ve got your multiple classes. As for playing as a boy, you couldn’t, clearly. It rather defeats the point, and the Witcher games (yes, I know you don’t consider them RPGs) have proven that a somewhat predefined protagonist in exchange for more narrative reactivity and combat depth is an acceptable compromise for most RPG fans.

If I were actually making this game, I’d tell you to go play something else, honestly.

I just..what? How the bloody hell do you come to that conclusion at all? No, I really want to know. RPGs encompass loads of things, and often don’t include gender option in them. How is playing as a set character ANY DIFFERENT from any of them? Just..how? The conclusions your brain jumps to, Wizardry, are astounding, and I almost desire to know what you smoke.

“I want to play as a boy who wanted to be a wizard ever since he was little.

And this is exactly why it’s difficult to centre an RPG around a single issue.”

Well, on one hand I’m inclined to say “maybe this one game isn’t for you”. Gaming is big enough to fit a few RPGs that are just aimed at people who want to play as a female character. Then again, some RPGs focus on a pre-defined story, and others offer free choice in a sandbox – this latter method offers unique tools and approaches for exploring themes in a new way.

I think one of the most challenging ideas to convey in traditional media is how sexist attitudes are also harmful to men. In gaming, it’s possible to design the game in such a way that the player can naturally explore the themes and issues as either gender (or through fantastical characters who are non-gendered or multi-gendered) while still having a very strong association with the character.

Now, ideally I don’t think you should make a game about a single issue so much as a theme. If your theme was, for example, attitudes regarding gender and education, you might have a steampunk RPG where some cultures rejected female tinkerers while other cultures reject male scientists because their men are supposed to be warrior-poets.

I mentioned Game of Thrones gender politics because it’s a hot topic in fantasy right now, and is something I would be curious to see explored in games, but this isn’t about feminism specifically, as important as gender issues are to gaming these days. It’s about making fantasy worlds that challenge our expectations and speak to our present-day issues outside of their usual context, rather than just rehashing or subverting the same old tropes.

@Merktera: That’s completely different. Not giving the player a specific option, whether it’s race, religion, gender or even class, makes complete sense in a game that never bothers to touch on them. So a game like Phantasie is fine even though it doesn’t include a gender option, because every character is effectively ambiguous. In fact, what you name your character is the only real indication of what their gender is.

@Wooly: How do I go about reporting posts? I can do it on the forum but I can’t seem to do it here.

This project is by the main guy behind Planescape: Torment, which is considered by many to be the pinnacle of computer RPG storytelling, and I think the hope to recapture some of that magic will be a big part of what drives the kickstarter to its goal and likely far beyond. If Obsidian owned the Planescape setting/IP, this likely would have used that instead of being a new IP as a “spiritual successor”. So I don’t find it strange or disappointing at all if they chose not to stray beyond its fantasy roots. Doing something quirky or experimental would lose a great deal of the nostalgia market they’re capitalizing on.

Backed as well (my first KS tbh), but yeah personally I’d like it is they weren’t being forced to tread well worn territory again (that’s what the majority want it seems). I’d been more down with a futuristic game of some sort, but perhaps financial success with free them up to do other things in the future (Obsidian have been rather unfortunate with a lot of their past projects it has to be said). Given the position of the funding at the moment it’s pretty clear they’re going to hit their target. Hopefully the funding they get will really allow them to knock it out of the park.

I know, right? What we know of it doesn’t immediately grab me like the strange world of PST. I thought maybe they’d for once do an interesting sci fi setting, like Firefly or something. But nope! What RPGs need is more dragons and elves!

I know, right? What we know of it doesn’t immediately grab me like the strange world of PST. I thought maybe they’d for once do an interesting sci fi setting, like Firefly or something. But nope! What RPGs need is more dragons and elves!

I’d say Planescape’s combat was crap because of Infinity engine, not because it was real-time with active pause.
I’m partial to real-time, but from the list of games they mentioned, ToEE had the best combat by far.

There’s a lot of greatness in those games, but the combat isn’t a part of it. KOTOR was bearable in that respect, but in particular Planescape’s combat system is so bad I eventually gave up on the game despite adoring every non-combat element of it. Real time with pause is a system that, for me, rarely manages to be a good one and even in its most positive occurrences I’d still far prefer a turn-based system. This is of course all personal preferences: I find group management in a real time/pause system a chaotic mess, even with all sorts of possible AI guidelines you can set, and it’s simply a system I’ve never found to be a comfortable one.

I’d also say that the first two Fallouts and Arcanum are superior RPGs to all those, and they had turn-based combat systems to boot.

To be fair, all those games (except Kotor) are also based on D&D rules, which don’t really lend themselves very well to real time + pause implementation.

I personally really liked Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel, where you could toggle it between real-time for easier encounters (because real-time is so much faster to play) and turn-based for difficult encounters.

Well, in a sense you could say even KotOR was based on D&D rules since it was based on the SW RPG WotC made, which used the D20 system. That being the one designed for 3e D&D.

And what you did in Fallout is exactly what I did in the Infinity Engine games, I just left in in real time mode and let the AI handle all of the characters. If things went poorly I would take an increasing amount of control and reload and do actual prep pre-battle when necessary. The fact I couldn’t do that in Dragon Age is annoyed me to no end.

Keep in mind those games were made long long ago, and that was advanced stuff for its time…

Think Neverwinter nights 2 combat updated would be the best example.

I would also like to point out that while those games listed were all real time, they were also round based. There was a limit to the amount of actions you can do in a set time, regardless.

Which actually made the game play out quicker than turn based, but kept the depth of turn based combat, as the actually systems used were based on a turns.

People with little understanding of game mechanics might not understand what i am saying. Go play Dragon age 1, hell or play 2. Those are full realtime combat, and actually quite crapper, while the older infinity engine games were all realtime, but round based as well, which kept the depth of combat in the game.

When people criticise RTWAP the problem isn’t real time itself but execution. Whenever you get into specifics about RTWAP its always about individual aspects. For me its the absence of zones of control in the Infinity engine games. Which meant that enemies could just waltz straight past my warrior and kill my mage without any attacks of opportunity or chance of interrupting. For others it’s being able to exploit the engine such as casting area of effect spells at the edge of the screen so you can kill the enemy before triggering their encounter. When done right with every rule in place (aka Neverwinter Nights 2) its often let down by awful interfaces that take way too long to navigate every 10 seconds (aka Neverwinter Nights 2) or by terrible AI (aka Neverwinter Nights 2).

As long as this models decent zone of control rules like Neverwinter Nights 2 did. I shall be very very happy.

Oblivion’s combat was more fun than Dragon Age’s, and I hated Oblivion’s combat and quite liked Dragon Age.

Well, I should qualify that by saying that Dragon Age’s combat is pretty okay when it clicks. It’s just that it clicks about four times through the whole game. I turned the difficulty to Easy just so I wouldn’t have to suffer through the rest.

Turn-based is another question; I have nothing against it in most games, but I did find it kind of jerky and immersion breaking in Fallout 1 and 2. Nothing on the level of JRPG style random encounters, mind you.

I could never get into Arcanum or Fallout. I’ve tried so many times but the combat opitimises all the worst parts of turn based rpgs. Characters missing at point blank again and again and again, unbearably long trash fights against rats, having to pick the same attack every round. In party based games the turn based style is a strength as you have formations and classes with special skills and party composition to focus on.

So never liked Fallout or Arcanum, good games with bad combat on top of. Temple of Elemental Evil on the other hand had a good combat engine in a terrible game with bad writing terrible encounter design and rubbish quest design.

This is honestly the main reason I’m buying it. There have been so very many turn-based RPGs on Kickstarter of late. And while I’ve backed a few, I’m not a fan of full-on turn-based combat. The combat of NWN2 or KOTOR II is much more my thing.

This. TB RPGs are alright, I’ve loved some of them, including Fallout mind you.
But they are more of a thing for games with a lot of senseless combat and less about exploring a unique RPG world like Baldur’s Gate 2 or PS:T etc. was…

Some people are saying that Jagged Alliance 2 had the best Turn-Based combat, but a single combat round would often take above 10 minutes to finish, sometimes even a lot longer and it did practically have near to no story. Those aren’t the type of RPGs I enjoy the most.

Obsidian are exceptionally good at story, character and world-building and for some inexplicable reason some people apparently want them to forego their strength instead and design their RPG around combat? We saw how well that turned out with Dungeon Siege III.

JA2 is a game where you basically play it specifically *for* the combat system. The combat system *is* the game – everything else is just flavour. Which is why it doesn’t really work all that well when modern devs have messed with it.

I think there is some feeling that taking some RPG systems that are designed as turn based and putting them into a real-time with pause system losses something in the translation. A lot of that has to do with timing and the fact that things don’t happen simultaneously in those systems. Pure turn based does let combat play out in a more like chess like way – which can definitely be fun. However, since we are designing Project Eternity from the start to use a real-time with pause system, we can avoid some of the translation issues that can happen when taking a table top game into that arena.

Or, to be more precise “Our game will have a combat that will not be enjoyed by that Guy Wizardry from the RPS comments section, but will prove satisfactory to many over factions of the incredibly varied lot that is old* school RPG fans”.

*: you’re mileage may vary.

Personally prefer purely turn-based, but if I could suffer the AD&D systemic tumor in those old Infinity Engine games, I think a game designed from the get go to use real-time/pause should feel quite painless.

Not to mention I personally think combat should only be a relatively minor element of a well designed RPG game anyway.

And how many old-school RPGs are real-time with pause anyway? Well, Darklands and, um, er…

I don’t see where I might even implied otherwise. You’ll also notice I don’t personally say cRPGs. What I hope of computer RPG games – what I’ve been hoping for more than 30 years – is proper emulation for one player of the pnp RPG experience. A good portion of the old school cRPGs you love are probably failures to me.

If it should be a minor element of a well designed RPG, say 20% of it, what makes up the other 80% and how do you keep that 80% mechanically interesting and highly dependent on character skill?

Manipulation of narrative elements via various sub-systems, among which, yes, character skills (only non-combat ones). The reduction of conflict to combat is damaging to the genre if anything.

So what you want is a proper recreation of the pen and paper experience, but you don’t mind real-time combat? All I see here is contradictions. Surely if that’s what you want then you’d be a turn-based purist like myself.

And regarding what you are saying about non-combat gameplay, I agree with you entirely. But if you’ve actually played many CRPGs with a lot of non-combat gameplay, you’ll probably realise that the vast majority of them barely check attributes regularly outside combat for actions and activities. Perhaps picking a lock, or pickpocketing an NPC, perhaps even the odd skill check during a conversation or two. But really, these aren’t the kind of things gamers judge the “non-combat” parts of CRPGs on. They judge them on the story progression, or the number of non-combat solutions the developers have crammed into a quest. In other words, rarely the mechanics between character stats and game world, and this is the single biggest problem with CRPGs that focus on non-combat gameplay.

“If it should be a minor element of a well designed RPG, say 20% of it, what makes up the other 80% and how do you keep that 80% mechanically interesting and highly dependent on character skill?”

What is this blinkered obsession of yours with character skill driving everything? The vast majority of PnP RPG interactions are generally devoid of dice rolls and are wholly dependent on the players making decisions and the GM/DM weighing them up and responding to them. If you’re having to reach for the dice every two seconds in an RPG is can only mean you’re dungeon crawling not role playing.

@Kadayi: Wrong. A good DM is one who would take the statistics of your character into account for most actions you want to perform. If you want your character to jump over a chasm, or climb up a cliff, the DM may make you roll dice, or he may just make a decision on the outcome with a quick glance at your stats. Are these things specifically in the rulebooks? No. Is the DM intelligently making them up as the game goes along? Yes.

Now take away the human DM and think of a computer implementation. These “soft rules” that the DM applies now need to be made into hard rules. This is why CRPGs need more mechanics than pen and paper RPGs to be interesting. This is why non-combat interactions in a CRPG need plenty of mechanics to remain as interesting as the combat, even though something like D&D leaves non-combat interactions largely up to the DM.

“Wrong. A good DM is one who would take the statistics of your character into account for most actions you want to perform. If you want your character to jump over a chasm, or climb up a cliff, the DM may make you roll dice, or he may just make a decision on the outcome with a quick glance at your stats. Are these things specifically in the rulebooks? No. Is the DM intelligently making them up as the game goes along? Yes.”

A GM will feed off your players skills as and when, but ultimately it is you as the player who drive the character. This is just not something you seem to comprehend. Let’s say you encounter a sphinx in a game and it challenges your party to answer a riddle. Does the GM just roll a die against your collective character intelligence and say yes you answered correctly or not without recourse to the players, or does he/she ask you the players to solve it? I’ve never yet encountered a GM who’d opt for the former Vs the latter approach tbh.

What is true of PnP is equally true of cRPGs. Certainly a game can utilize character statistics to shape experiences/options but ultimately it is the player who drives the action. This notion you have that everything has to be character skill based, and therefore there have to be innumerable character skills to account for every contingency (ability to fart discreetly, ability to look winsome in an oversized shirt, etc, etc) is a hilarious fiction to put it bluntly.

Well I for one absolutely hated it when DMs based outcomes on my own ability to solve riddles or my own ability to role-play convincingly. Why punish my character for my own faults? Are you going to punish strong fighters in combat if their players are weak little nerds in real life? Because that’s what it’s like when you punish my extremely wise and intelligent cleric for failing to solve a simple riddle due to my own brain farts.

And you’re exaggerating massively on those skills. I don’t necessarily want separate skills for every single thing a character can do. You can use existing skills in a general capacity. For example, farting quietly can be done using your stealth skill.

What you hate doesn’t come into it sunshine. That’s how PnP RPGs are played. Fact of the matter is statistics like ‘intelligence’ and ‘wisdom’ aren’t the entire lexicon of a characters knowledge or smarts. The players ability to rationalize, strategise and reason are inherent to the experience.

“Your entire argument breaks down because every single thing that happens in a pen and paper RPG has to be put into code or data for a video game RPG.”

Has to? There’s no has to about it. I’ve already demonstrated the fallacious nature of your argument through the example of the riddle in a PnP RPG game. There’s no way on earth a GMs going to say ‘you’re presented with a riddle’ to his/her players and then just roll a dice to determine the result. The whole point of presenting the players with a conundrum is to see whether they can solve it themselves.

This idea that everything in a computer RPG has to somehow be derived solely from character statistics is an absolute joke of an idea, given it’s quite clearly not the rule with PnP RPGs and it’s about time you gave up on endlessly promoting this sad fiction and moved on.

Why are you trying to push your poor pen and paper sessions on the genre, Kadayi? No one plays pen and paper RPGs to solve riddles. And that’s ignoring the whole point that stupid dungeon riddles are totally contrived. You know what it is when the DM bypasses your character’s skill and looks at your skill (at role-playing or what have you)? LARPing. Yeah. And there’s a reason that’s not the same as tabletop role-playing.

You’re literally saying “When I play RPGs the DM tends to mix in mini-games to make up for his lack of talent, so I believe that CRPGs can include mini-games of other genres too.” Maybe the Dougherty brothers were on to something after all!

I’m pretty sure narrative puzzles have been a stable of RPGs since the days of basic D&D and Gygaxs own adventures, but still feel free to believe otherwise. Or is your next line of defense that Gygax wasn’t a true RPGr? I seem to recall some time back you were quite bullish in pronouncing that Chris Avellone didn’t know what RPGs were (despite seemingly having worked on a few), so it wouldn’t surprise me if your lunacy extended that far tbh.

They were quite clearly finding their feet in the good old days. “Our campaign is pretty boring, how can we improve it? Why not stick in a few puzzles here and there for variety until we can figure out a better solution.” In fact, haven’t you realised yet that this is exactly what happened to CRPGs too? The good old CRPGs had puzzles galore. Games like Dark Heart of Uukrul and the Phantasie series had lots of neat puzzles. But how many puzzles are there in new games like Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age II or Skyrim? And how many of those puzzles were actually good or challenging?

So, Kadayi, explain to me why you hate old-school CRPGs when they are filled to the brim with puzzles? If you do believe that these puzzles are a hugely important and even necessary part of RPGs then surely you’d love these games.

The only way I could play a party-based cRPG with turn-based combat is if it was simultaneous like Bard’s Tale/Wasteland/Dragon Wars or Frozen Synapse. The way it worked in Fallout or Arcanum was terrible and the reason the combat was the worst part of those games. In FO it was at least tolerable since the encounter sizes were small and you only had full control over a single character, but FO:Tactics was terrible.

Black and white much? There are turn-based RPGs out there that don’t have shit combat and aren’t simultaneous. You’re basically looking at opposite ends of a spectrum here, with one side being shitty turn-based RPGs and the other being phase-based ones. In fact, you’re missing out the best and most tactical combat systems that include the likes of Jagged Alliance 2.

I like Fallout and JA2. I still think they’d be vastly improved with phase-based combat. Turn-based combat is one of the many things that was carried over from boardgames/wargaming and there’s really no logical reason for a computer game to use it. That doesn’t mean it isn’t fun, just that I find it completely anti-immersive to be exploring a world that reacts believably to my actions and then suddenly I’m dropped into a situation where people are standing around with their thumbs up their backsides waiting for people to move.

I’ve no idea if anything worthwhile will come out of this, but I’m sure they’ll have no trouble reaching their goal and I look forward to see what they end up making. Personally, I’m hoping for something that’s more Baldur’s Gate than Planescape.

Considering this one will be 100% under their control, you won’t have that situation. No publisher to suddenly cut months off of your development time and rush out your product and not pay for supplemental support.

DS3 was a solid and completely functional not buggy game. Granted, it lacked the depth of their real rpg games, but that is pretty good proof that given the correct amount of time. Obsidian will release a bug free game.

Actually, it’s worth noting that this will probably run on the Onyx Engine, Obsidian’s in-house engine. Onyx is very stable and apparently built from the ground up for RPG games. Only one game’s come out on Onyx so far, DSIII, but it was very stable and pretty well optimized. The game itself wasn’t that great, but I don’t think you can blame that on the engine.

considering Chris Avellone (or at least one of them) basically said he though the DnD rules made Planescape’s combat horrible and would avoid them if he ever did a new game of the same ilk… I rather hope any “real time with tactical pause” system is developed to be just that, rather than the “turn based with real time unpause” system of the old games

I cant wait to get into this game, the ability to for them to explore a story they want to create, and provide a deeper experience than what publishers allow. And for them to release when the game is ready, not when the publisher decides.

Edit. My wife is gonna kill me. I’m gonna have to hide money and open my own bank account so give them to much money. Totally worth it though. Not only will my wife divorce me, i’ll have more time to play the game when it comes out!!

Chalk me up as another person who didn’t read what it was about before backing. I’ll gladly give Obsidian money, they are one of my favourite development houses. Looking forward to the game. I wasn’t big on the infinity engine style games back in their prime, but I’ve been trying to play through planescape and a few others. Cannot wait!

Combat uses a tactical real-time with pause system – positioning your party and coordinating attacks and abilities is one of the keys to success. The world map is dotted with unique locations and wilderness ripe for exploration and questing. You’ll create your own character and collect companions along the way – taking him or her not just through this story, but, with your continued support, through future adventures. You will engage in dialogues that are deep, and offer many choices to determine the fate of you and your party. …and you’ll experience a story that explores mature themes and presents you with complex, difficult choices to shape how your story plays out.

Real-time with pause? Collecting companions? Deep dialogues offering many choices? Oh Obsidian, who are you trying to fool?

Wizardry only thinks that only slow, clumsy, primitive with hardly any plot, like Wizardry, are true RPGs. Baldur’s Gate, Fallout and Planescape aren’t real RPGs because the writers dared to actually give those games plot and substance.

It seems like Wizardry’s absence combined with lots of new RPS readers means we’re all going to have to hear what Wizardry’s very specific and immovable definition of an RPG is again and again and again and again until we all hate the written word.

Which is a shame because beneath it all Wiz does have a few good points (but don’t tell him I said so).

I think I broadly understand your frustration with the direction the industry has taken, the ‘evolution’ of terms that have a clearly-defined meaning to you, and so on. But it does get incredibly tedious having to go over those same opinions again and again, gradually clarifying your point to newcomers, etc.

You should seriously set up a site with all of your frequently-recurring arguments and definitions and preferences, set out in a structured way for easy linking. That way the pointless part of these discussions could be skipped — those with a genuine interest could read, understand your point of view, and go straight to either ‘agreeing to disagree’ or offering a novel counter-argument.

If I may give some advice… Don’t just back it. Go and play Baldur’s Gate, Icewind Dale and/or PlaneScape Torment (they’re all available on GoG, and there’s HD Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2 coming). They are each very similar, but also very different games… so if you’re looking for one sort of game in particular, one (or two) of them should do it.

Temple of Elemental Evil and Arcanum are both mentioned, and are both Troika. Of course Planescape is technically from a company that no longer exists (no matter how much the current Interplay says otherwise).

Tim Cain worked on Bloodlines, and as far as I can work out, was the only one of the three being name-dropped here that worked at Troika.

Not really, no. It featured party-based combat, sure, because during combat you have as much control over your companions as you do the protagonist. But the game itself isn’t party-based because your one created character is the centre of the plot, the only one that isn’t dispensable, the only one that starts the game, the only one that gains plot related powers, and, most importantly, the only one who doesn’t or won’t fuck off based on your actions. If Baldur’s Gate 2 was a party-based game then I would have been allowed to tell Imoen not to cast that spell at Irenicus, and I would have been allowed to make ______ not betray me.

No, not really. I’m sure it’s pretty universal. I mean, do you really believe that combat is all that defines an RPG? Because that’s the only explanation for equating “party-based RPGs” and “RPGs with party-based combat”. If combat is only a part of the game, then surely it’s only correct to differentiate the two.

I know. I was just informing you because you seemed ignorant of it. You seem to have been posting as if you thought the only Party based part of BG is the combat, when it isn’t. Saying that it isn’t Party based, and that Party based shouldn’t be equated with a game that just has Party based combat.

I get what you’re trying to say, I guess, but that’s an incredibly silly distinction to make. To say that “Party-based RPG” refers only to a game where you have 100% control of your entire party, all the time, instead of just one character, and that you create them all at the start of the game, is incredibly limiting. I can’t think of any games where that is actually the case, though I’m sure you can name a few. Every example I can come with that fits that definition isn’t also an RPG. And it’s kind of silly to say that that sort of system would be in any way better, since it means that you’re still only controlling one “entity” (your party, who you have 100% control of) and therefore for all purposes of story they are the same. And furthermore it precludes the idea of having any sort of companions who travel with you whom you don’t have full control of, which can add depth to the game. On top of that, it could be argued that such a game no longer even qualifies as an RPG since you are not playing the role of any character, but rather are playing as a sort of god-figure controlling the lives of a group of people.

TL;DR – you don’t get to define the terms we use to describe RPGs any more than I get to claim that “MOBA” doesn’t describe DotA et al. Terms are defined by popular use, not by what you feel like they should mean. Stop feeling superior because you managed to write a definition of some terms that is different from what everyone else uses; all that makes you is wrong. Pick a different term to describe your games, because “Party-based RPG” is already taken.

Edit: And your whole reasoning for what you think party-based RPG should mean is just silly. I mean, seriously, that’s a pretty big stretch from the definition of “party-based”, even given an arbitrary definition of RPG.

@Unaco: Well, it shouldn’t. I mean, a party-based RPG to me is one where you roll a bunch of characters, form a party and go off on an adventure with them. An RPG with party-based combat is one where you roll a single character and go on an adventure, recruiting various personalities on the way that have their own agendas and play second fiddle to your guy.

@Ritashi

I can’t think of any games where that is actually the case, though I’m sure you can name a few. Every example I can come with that fits that definition isn’t also an RPG.

Really? Because if you ignore JRPGs I’m sure over half of all CRPGs are exactly like this. I find it hard to believe that anyone is unable to think of one.

And furthermore it precludes the idea of having any sort of companions who travel with you whom you don’t have full control of, which can add depth to the game.

No it doesn’t. See Wasteland and hopefully Wasteland 2. It’s a party-based RPG because you create your four man party, but you can also pick up some expendable dudes on the way (like you can in Fallout) to fill up some additional slots.

You could create your own entire party of characters in BALDUR’S GATE if you really wanted to, though. It was normal to play with the AI companions, but you could generate a party right at the start and completely ignore every other NPC would-be companion in the game if that’s how you wanted to roll.

“Party-based” has a different meaning to the older CRPG addicts among us, the ones who insist upon that C to differentiate it from PnP RPGs, and among those people, the definition is pretty universal.

Personally, I agree with a more inclsive, modern definition of, well, almost everything, but having seen this argument between Wasteland grognards and Fallout fanatics crop up a million times on the Wasteland 2 boards, I get what he’s saying. It’s a very Codexian way of looking at things, which I don’t tend to agree with, but it does mean something rather specific to a number of people, many of whom are probably going to back this thing, so I can see what he means by deceitful.

That said, they’re not just hoping to rope in old-school players like Fargo was, and the term is pretty ambiguous (like most RPG terms, including “RPG” itself), so I don’t think it’s as much of an issue as Wizardry’s making it out to be. It’ll be an issue for the Codexers, but those people are kind of lunatics about a whole lot of stuff anyway. I am actually glad they exist, but they’re nuts.

The newly updated FAQ in progress indicates that they are still exploring multiple digital delivery options – one of which will definitely be Steam. Which doesn’t make me unhappy – but perhaps alternatives will include some kind of direct download or GOG or other DRM-free avenue for purchase…

Oh nice, i was going to ask that question to them directly good to see someone else already did. I did pledge but if they do give an option for a drm-free version i would update my pledge in a heartbeat

I have to say… I really don’t like Jeremy Soule’s output. I guess after hearing him in so many “fantasy” soundtracks it gets a little samey (in the same way that a billion LotR knock-offs make LotR itself feel a bit generic).

They haven’t said much about the story or the setting so far, but what’s there seems to be leaning toward disappointingly generic fantasy tropes (locations like “Guilded Vale,” “Godhammer Citadel,” etc).